The hottest politician in Brazil today is a swart, heavyset, pulsating man named Adhemar Pereira de Barros. "Our Adhemar," as his admirers call him, is governor of the state of São Paulo, Brazil's richest province, home of its heavy industry, and exporter of 60% of its cotton and coffee. Its capital city of São Paulo is the fastest growing big city in the world (1947 pop.: 1,600,000).
Adhemar is part democrat and part demagogue, part do-gooder and part spellbinder. There is something about him that suggests Franklin Roosevelt—also Huey Long and Fiorello LaGuardia. He was once a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, but now disclaims any allegiance to it.
Last week, after a razzle-dazzle five months in office, Adhemar had two triumphs to his credit. He had rammed a new state constitution through the provincial legislature. And the Catholic Church had dropped its hostility toward him, which had arisen from his opportunist pre-election alliance with the Communists last January. His daughter would be married this week in the Church of the Convent of Mount Carmel by São Paulo's Archbishop, Carlo Carmelo, Cardinal de Vasconcellos Motta.
Adhemar's constitution was something new for Brazilians to look at. It abolished the hated secret police, promised more education, and guaranteed a limited amount of workmen's compensation. Paulistas liked the new constitution, as they seemed to like Adhemar. In a recent poll, 76% said they approved of his methods of running things.
Adhemar used to be a doctor. The son of a moderately well-to-do coffee planter, he romped with gold-medal honors-through the University of Brazil, where he studied medicine and played water polo. After two years at the Bayer Laboratory in Berlin, Germany, and at Johns Hopkins Medical School, he hung out his shingle in São Paulo. But the practice of medicine was slow and dull. He turned to politics and became a strong-voiced deputy in the state legislature.
Because he had often attacked Dictator Getulio Vargas, it was a good deal of a surprise when, in 1938, Vargas appointed him São Paulo's interventor, i.e., governor. De Barros thinks that Vargas expected him to "hang himself." Only, he laughs, "I didn't." As interventor, he built roads, hospitals and schools. Then, in 1941, after a fight with the Dictator's unsavory brother Benjamin, De Barros was fired. He had taken office a poor man; he left it the owner of plantations, textile factories, a dolomite mine and a candy factory.
Adhemar dropped out of the public spotlight until the revolution of 1945, when he scrambled back into politics. Many Paulistas think that his wife, Leonor, mother of his two strapping sons and his two daughters, spurred him on. "He may be the brains, but she is the soul of that team," they say.
Help from Leonor. At his famed Thursday night radio broadcasts from the yellow-stuccoed governor's palace, she sits with him. Often he seems to be speaking to her rather than to the cross section of São Paulo that crowds around the table or to the thousands of Paulistas who hear his voice through loudspeakers in the dusty squares of distant villages. The broadcasts have become a weekly event for listeners-in southern Brazil.